The documentary record of the New Communist Movement in the 1970’s presents a rich tapestry of groups, collectives, organizations, “pre-party formations”, and even parties, struggling to master the Marxist-Leninist tradition as they interpreted it and apply it to the conditions of their work.

Many of these groups were local collectives which arose out of the mass struggles of the 1960’s and subsequently turned to Marxism-Leninism in the 1970’s as these mass movements began to ebb. Some of these groups managed to develop strong ties in the workplaces and communities in which they worked and had a significant public presence. Others operated in a semi-clandestine fashion, through union caucuses and/or as fractions in “mass organizations.”

Some of these New Communist Movement groups were overwhelmingly white; others, however, were composed predominantly of people of color, such as the Revolutionary Workers League, the August 29th Movement, Wei Min She, El Comité, the Japan Town Collective and I Wor Kuen.

While aware of the developing party-building projects of the Communist League, Revolutionary Union and October League (documented in subsequent sections of EROL), the vast majority of these smaller groups chose not to join in any of them. The larger organizations may have decried what they perceived as the “local-circle mentality” of these smaller groups, but they were unsuccessful in overcoming it.

Documenting the history of the smaller anti-revisionist groups in the New Communist Movement in this period is particularly challenging because many of them focused on local organizing and eschewed involvement in national debates about party-building, the national question, the united front, etc.; produced little printed material; or otherwise chose to keep a low public profile.

Periodicals

The August 29th Movement (ATM) was a Chicano New Communist Movement organization that took its name from the historic August 29, 1970 Chicano Moratorium against the Vietnam War in Los Angeles. It was formed at a Unity Conference in May 1974 from the merger of the August 29th Collective of Los Angeles, California; the East Bay Labor Collective of Oakland, California; La Raza Workers Collective of San Francisco; and a collective from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The ATM published a pamphlet, “Fan The Flames: A Revolutionary Position on the Chicano National Question,” in 1975. The document argued that Chicanos living in the Southwestern United States were an oppressed nation, rather than an oppressed national minority, as was argued by most other New Communist Movement organizations.

The August Twenty-Ninth Movement published a newspaper, Revolutionary Cause, and a theoretical journal, The Red Banner.

In 1978, ATM merged with I Wor Kuen to form the League of Revolutionary Struggle.

The Buffalo Workers’ Movement (BWM) grew out of local opposition to the Vietnam War. The foundaing members came together to form the Veterans Club at the University of Buffalo. Later the group expanded to become a chapter of a national organization of anti¬war veterans named Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier Organization. Beginning in 1976, with the development of its positions set forth in the published Working Papers, the group consolidated its Marxist-Leninist line and began to involve itself more strategically in local working class and community struggles.

At the same time, the BWM became more active in the national anti-revisionist movement through its participation in the Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center (OC-IC).

Periodical

The Colorado Organization for Revolutionary Struggle (Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought (COReS (M-L-M)) was a regional multi-national anti-revisionist group that was formed in 1974. It had its origins primarily in the Chicano national movement and its headquarters in Denver. COReS sponsored a number of forums in Denver with other party building organizations in the latter half of the 1970s.

In 1980, COReS merged with the League for Proletarian Revolution (M-L) to form the Marxist-Leninist League.

The Commentator Collective was a small anti-revisionist group in New York City with Dave Davis, who may have formerly been with the Progressive Labor Party, at its center. The Collective began publishing a paper, The Anti-Fascist Commentator in 1973. The paper changed its name the following year to The Commentator and continued publishing irregularly thereafter until approximately 1978.

El Comité began in 1970 as a Puerto Rican community action group in Manhattan’s West Side. Over the course of the next several years, it transformed itself into an anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist organization and in 1975 changed its name to El Comite-Movemiento de Izquierda Nacional Puertorriqueño (El Comité-MINP).

El Comité-NINP was active in the New Communist Movement, including party building activities, until it disintegrated in 1984.

The Committee for a Proletarian Party (CPP) was a local San Diego collective which formed in the Spring of 1977. It was active in a number of local struggles and participated in the New Communist Movement nationally by publishing a number of pamphlets on issues of strategy and party building.

In 1978 it drew close to the Marxist-Leninist Organizing Committee and joined with it to create the Communist Party U.S.A./(Marxist-Leninist) that same year. However, a number of members soon left the CPUSA (M-L) over its pro-Albania positions and rejection of Mao Zedong’s contribution to Marxism-Leninism and reformed the CPP. Post 1980 documents of CPP can be found here.

The Communist Collective of the Chicano Nation (CCCN) was a small group located in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It began publishing an irregular newsletter, El Amanecer rojo (Red Dawn) in April 1973.

The CCCN argued, following Stalin’s definition, that a Chicano nation existed in a part of the U.S. southwest, namely New Mexico, Southern Colorado, and Southwestern Texas.

The CCCN participated in the Conference of North American Marxist-Leninists held by the Communist League and others in May 1973 at which it presented a theoretical paper on the Chicano National Question.

Periodical

The Congress of Afrikan People (CAP) had its roots in the Black Arts movement in Newark, New Jersey in the mid-1960s, largely through the efforts of Amiri Baraka. By the late-1960s, under the influence of Malcolm X, Ron Karenga’s US organization and the example of the Black Panthers, the CAP became an explicitly political, Black nationalist organization, with a focus of community organizing and cultural politics. In 1970, at its Atlanta Convention, CAP became a national organization dedicated to building a Black Political Party, including involvement in electoral politics.

In the early 1970s, a growing struggle developed within the CAP between the Black nationalists and the emerging Marxist-Leninist forces, headed by Baraka. With the departure of Haki Madhubuti and Jitu Weusi, the Marxist-Leninist tendency in the organization was strengthened and in 1974-75, CAP took up the study of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tse Tung Thought and, for a brief period, worked closely with the October League (Marxist-Leninist). Thereafter, it was briefly on the periphery of the Revolutionary wing.

In February, 1976 the organization changed its name to the Revolutionary Communist League (Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse-tung Thought). Early in 1980 the Revolutionary Communist League (M-L-M) merged with the League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L).

Periodical

This was a small group formed in Denver, Colorado in January 1979, consisting of several members of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists (COUSML) and a number of individuals who wrote and issued the pamphlet, The U.S. Communist Movement and A Re-Assessment in Light of the Struggle Against the Revisionist “Three World Theory.”

The Denver Committee was active on the Denver left in propagating the positions of forces opposed to the theory of “three worlds” as well as in struggles in the community at large. It was also active in promoting COUSML’s work toward the formation of the Marxist-Leninist Party (MLP). Members of the Denver Committee joined or worked closely with the MLP from its founding to the dissolution of the Denver MLP branch in 1983. Thereafter, two members moved to Chicago, becoming part of the circle around the Chicago Workers’ Voice theoretical journal.

The East Wind Collective (Marxist-Leninist) was formed in 1972 by leaders in radical Asian-American, primarily Japanese, community groups in Los Angeles. Its predecessor organization, the Community/Workers Collective, had brought together activists from the city’s campuses and community groups. At its height, the Collective had 25 to 30 members, with an activist core of 15. An interesting feature of the organization was that many of its members lived together collectively. East Wind was extremely active in a variety of projects, from helping publish the newspaper Gidra, to labor organizing, to opposition to gentrification in Little Tokyo.

Originally primarily nationalist in ideology, by 1975 East Wind adopted Marxism-Leninism and became involved in anti-revisionist party building. By the end of the 1970s it had drawn close to I Wor Kuen and in 1979, after IWK’s merger with the August 29th Movement in the League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L) the previous year, East Wind dissolved itself and joined the League.

I Wor Kuen (Righteous and Harmonious Fists) took its name from a peasant organization that fought to expel foreigners from China during the so-called “Boxer Rebellion.” Founded in 1969 by second-generation Chinese Americans in New York’s Chinatown, it adopted a 12-point program Platform and Program, similar to those previously issued by the Black Panther Party and the Young Lords. It also advocated Mao Zedong thought and engaged in militant struggles in the community. It also started publication of a bi-lingual newspaper, Getting Together.

In 1971, I Wor Kuen became a national organization when it merged with former members of the San Francisco-based Red Guard Party, a group which was founded in February 1969 and disbanded in July 1971. Also influenced by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the example of the Black Panther Party, the Red Guard Party had espoused Mao Zedong thought, advocated armed struggle and viewed itself primarily as a military rather than a political organization. By 1971, this focus on military rather than political organizing and other contradictions led to the Party’s break-up, but a group of former militants went on to join I Wor Kuen.

In 1972, to broaden its base and to reach out to community members unwilling to support an explicitly communist organization, I Wor Kuen created the Chinese Progressive Association which, after several years, had branches in New York, Boston and Los Angeles. 1972 also saw I Wor Kuen briefly participate in the National Liaison Committee, a joint party building effort of the Revolutionary Union, the Black Workers Congress, and the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization [for more on the National Liaison Committee and IWK's relation to it see here].

Throughout the 1970s, I Wor Kuen frequently clashed with other Marxist-Leninist groups active in Chinese communities across the country, including Wei Min She and the Asian Study Group/Workers Viewpoint Organization.

In 1978, I Wor Kuen merged with the August 29th Movement to found the League for Revolutionary Struggle (Marxist-Leninist).

Periodicals

The Japan Town Collective (also known as the J-Town Collective) was a Marxist-Leninist organization in San Francisco’s Japan Town neighborhood (Nihonmachi). It was founded in 1971 by former members of the Red Guard Party. Initially the group was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and solidarity campaigns on Japanese issues, particularly the anti-military base struggle in Okinawa. The organization was also very active in anti-gentrification struggles in the neighborhood through the Committee Against Nihonmachi Evictions (CANE).

The Japan Town Collective operated a community center in the neighborhood, involved itself in labor organizing, conducted study groups in Marxism-Leninism, and published a newspaper, New Dawn.

As differences developed in the New Communist Movement in 1975-6, particularly over Chinese foreign policy, the Japan Town Collective experienced sharp internal struggles with many cadre looking to I Wor Kuen for leadership. The resulting turmoil in the organization resulted in its disappearance by late 1975.

The Kansas City Revolutionary Workers Collective (KCRWC) was formed in February 1975. It had its origins in the Black student movement, particularly the Youth Organization for Black Unity (YOBU).

After its formation, the KCRWC passed through a series of stages in which it grew close to different national Marxist-Leninist groups. First, it worked with the Revolutionary Union and participated in the process leading to the formation of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Then it aligned itself with the Workers Viewpoint Organization while the latter was a part of the Revolutionary Wing.

After breaking with the Wing, the KCRWC also began to reject the “theory of three worlds” and Mao Zedong Thought and thereafter actively involved itself with a number of small Marxist-Leninist groups around the country which had aligned themselves with the Party of Labor of Albania’s analysis of the crisis in the world communist movement. By 1980, the KCRWC decided that the Party of Labor of Albania was not taking a correct Marxist-Leninist line and broke with them, too, declaring that “part of the ’main blow’ must go against the revisionism-centrism of the PLA and their followers in every country.”

In August 1981 the Kansas City Marxist-Leninist Cell and the Kansas City Revolutionary Workers Collective merged to form the Organization for a Marxist-Leninist Workers’ Party U.S.A.

Coming out of the “new left” movement, the League for Proletarian Revolution was formed in the summer of 1972 from the merger of two separate collectives: The Revolutionary Workers’ Caucus and the Red Detachment. The former was centered around trade union work, but was also involved in the study of Marxism-Leninism. The Red Detachment was a collective based in theoretical work which had developed in Berkeley’s student and intellectual circles. These two groups merged on the basis of building the Party as the central task of Marxist-Leninists, and began the work of studying and bringing Communist propaganda and agitation to the workers. In the early spring of 1974, a further merger took place between the League and the San Francisco Marxist-Leninist Organization which had been formed in the summer of 1973 by former members of the Venceremos Organization.

The League participated in the Communist League’s National Continuations Committee and joined the resultant Communist Labor Party, but many members soon left to form the Marxist-Leninist Collective.

This San Francisco Bay Area League for Proletarian Revolution should not be confused with another, New York-based League of Proletarian Revolution. That organization was the former Resistencia Puertorriqueña, which changed its name to the League for Proletarian Revolution in 1976.

The League of Struggle (M-L) was formed in San Diego in 1974. For much of its history it functioned as a secret organization. In 1975, it decided that party-building was the central task of U.S. Marxist-Leninists. During this period it was close to the August 29th Movement, but in the following year it decided that its theoretical-political orientation was closer to the Workers Viewpoint organization.

The Lexington Communist Collective (LCC) began as a Marxist study group in the fall of 1972, which later reorganized itself as a communist organization. In 1973, the LCC joined the party building effort of the American Communist Workers Movement (M-L) and was one of the groups that formed the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists (COUSML) later that year. In July 1974, some of the former members of the LCC broke with COUSML and refounded the LCC.

The Marxist-Leninist Collective, which had its origins in a Bay-area group called the League for Proletarian Revolution, was formed in 1975 as a split from the Communist Labor Party. It published a newsletter called the Workers’ Press and a pamphlet entitled Proletarian Revolution and the Split in the Working Class. When the China-Albania split developed in 1978-79, the Marxist-Leninist Collective took a pro-Albania position, which resulted in a split in the organization. The group continuing to call itself the Marxist-Leninist Collective subsequently involved itself in efforts to unify pro-Albania forces. The former members opposed to the pro-Albania position joined with others to form the Communist Organization, Bay Area, which later merged with other groups to form the Organization for Revolutionary Unity, which itself later merged into the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

Periodicals

The Marxist-Leninist League was created in 1974 when approximately one-third of the members of the New Voice group left the organization over differences described in the pamphlet Pragmatism and the Split in the New Voice. In 1978, the Marxist-Leninist League started publishing a quarterly theoretical journal entitled Science, Class and Politics. The journal continued publication into the 1990s. The journal’s line reflected the group’s origins in the Progressive Labor Party and the New Voice.

Few New Communist Movement organizations were affiliates of foreign anti-revisionist groups. The Marxist-Leninist Organization of the United States of America (MLOUSA) was an exception to this rule.

It was the U.S. sister organization of the Marxist-Leninist Organization of Britain (MLOB), a group that was created in the late 1960s out of elements from the first major UK anti-revisionist organization – the Committee to Defeat Revisionism for Communist Unity [for more on the MLOB see here].

While the MLOUSA had its own publications – a newspaper, the Workers’ Tribune and a theoretical journal, Proletariat – many of its major articles were reprints of its British sister organization. It also distributed MLOB publications such as Red Front, Red Vanguard and Class Against Class in the United States.

Like the MLOB, the MLOUSA sided with Liu Shao-Chi in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which it viewed as a counter-revolutionary attempt to restore capitalism in China. To publicize its position, the MLOUSA reprinted the MLOB’s Report on the Situation in the People’s Republic of China in Proletariat.

The MLOUSA was ahead of its time. As early as 1972, it was predicting that China was moving toward an alliance with U.S. imperialism and that only Albania maintained a principled Marxist-Leninist position. These views would taken up by a variety of other anti-revisionist groups later in the 1970s.

Founded in the early 1970s and based in San Francisco, the MLOUSA seems to have disappeared a few years later.

Periodical

Primary Documents

The Milwaukee Alliance (MA) grew out of the Wisconsin Alliance (WA), a group started in Madison in 1968 as an attempt to take the anti-war movement into Madison’s working class. The conception of the WA was to build a worker-farmer-student alliance around support for socialism.

The WA was started by Marxist-Leninists who had broken with the CPUSA and the Progressive Labor Party. They were reacting both against revisionism and ultra-leftism. The WA was conceived of as a classic popular front – an alliance of all classes opposed to capitalism. The organization was consolidated around a very low level of unity, which put forward socialism and communism in concept, but not in name.

The Milwaukee chapter of the WA was formed in 1973, after two previously unsuccessful attempts. After several years of struggle, the MA decided to leave the WA in 1976, arguing that class transformation was the primary task for the MA and that the MA could not concentrate on this task and be involved in a statewide organization at the same time.

At this point, the MA went to an intensive period of re-establishing mass work. In the spring of 1977 the MA embarked upon a study of party building to raise the ideological level and the political unity within the organization. The study resulted in the Milwaukee Alliance reaching unity on Marxism-Leninism, and the fact that party building was our central task.

In 1978, however, the MA underwent a split in which approximately 40% of the group left the organization to form the Milwaukee Socialist Union. By the end of the decade the MA had ceased to exist.

The Milwaukee Socialist Union (MSU) was formed from a split in the Milwaukee Alliance in 1978. Approximately 40% of the organization left to form the MSU.

The split occurred over a number of issues, including party building and the basis of unity for party building, as well as the issue of defining the “main enemy” of the peoples of the world. The individuals who went on to form the MSU generally took a position on these issues closely aligned to those of the Philadelphia Workers Organizing Committee (PWOC).

The MSU actively participated in the work of the Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center (OC-IC) and in general faithfully followed the PWOC line, issuing criticisms of various forces which it deemed insufficiently loyal to the PWOC approach to building the OC-IC.

The New Voice (TNV) was started in the early 1970s by a group of former members of the Progressive Labor Party in Sacramento, California who left the Party for the reasons set out in The Anti-Marxist-Leninist Line of Progressive Labor by John Ericson and Charles Loren. Through most of its history the primary leader of TNV was Charles Loren.

TNV inherited from Progressive Labor a rejection of the “united front against imperialism” strategy in the U.S., calling instead for socialist revolution. Also like PL, it saw Black Americans as racially oppressed and rejected the “national oppression” theory associated with most U.S. anti-revisionists.

Over the course of its history, TNV consistently supported the international line of the Communist Party of China, including the “theory of three worlds” and the contention that the Soviet Union was the more dangerous of the two super-powers and the major source of war.

Perhaps TNV’s period of greatest influence was in 1973-74 when it was briefly associated with the Communist League and its National Continuations Committee. Charles Loren’s book, The Struggle for the Party, written during this period, was widely distributed and debated in the New Communist Movement.

Throughout its history TNV issued a publication of the same name, first as a newssheet, later as a newspaper and finally as a pamphlet-sized journal.

In 1978, after years of criticizing other New Communist Movement groups for various deviations, TNV welcomed the announcement of the CP ML’s Marxist-Leninist Unity Committee and offered to participate, but was bitterly disappointed when the Committee declined to respond to its overtures. No doubt, TNV’s opposition to the Black Nation analysis of African-American oppression and its open sympathy for a US role in the world alliance against Soviet social-imperialism were the reasons for the CP (M-L)’s reluctance to engage with TNV.

In the early 1980s TNV changed its name to the League for a Labor Republic and abandoned most of the Marxist-Leninist language in its journal, which began to appear irregularly and finally ceased publication in the late 1980s.

New Jersey Friends of the New Voice

The New York Communist Workers’ Organization (NYCWO) was a small group that began in the early 1970s. It issued two papers. The first, entitled The Opportunism of The Revolutionary Union and The Black Workers Congress in Relation To The Trade Unions, appeared in 1972. The second paper, called A Party Or A Sect?, criticized what it saw as the ultra-left conception of party building being put forward by the Revolutionary Union in 1974.

Some of the members of the NYCWO later went on to form a group called the Trade Union Educational Alliance. This group attempted in a Guardian radical forum article to show the errors of the ultra-left conceptions of theory held by many in the movement.

Primary Documents

The Party for Workers Power arose from a split in the Progressive Labor Party in January 1974. It consisted of most of the Boston PL leadership and membership, approximately 25% of the PL membership as a whole. Led by Jared Israel, the PWP published a newspaper, Spark.

Primary Documents

PWOC was formed in 1971 by a group of activists who had been deeply involved in the struggles of the 1960’s, particularly the anti-war and civil rights movements. In January 1975 it began publishing a newspaper, The Organizer, which soon gained a national circulation. The following year, PWOC began to publish a series of articles critical of Chinese Foreign policy, what it saw as the dogmatism and sectarianism of the major new communist movement groups. It also published a pamphlet rejecting the “Black nation” approach to analyzing African American oppression. These positions gained PWOC a national following among independent Marxist-Leninists and collectives across the country. PWOC also put forth a party building line, called “fusion” which prioritized fusing Marxism-Leninism with the working class movement.

Building on this support, PWOC took the lead in bringing together a loose network of groups which came to be known as the Committee of Five, consisting of PWOC, the Detroit Marxist-Leninist Organization (DMLO), El Comité, the Socialist Union of Baltimore (SUB), and the Potomac Socialist Organization (PSO). In June 1976 a public call was issued for a conference of Marxist-Leninists who associated themselves with an emerging “trend” in the New Communist Movement against “dogmatism”. The Committee also issued and distributed an 18-point draft of Principles of Unity for a Marxist-Leninist Conference, which was circulated in the first weeks of 1977. The two most critical of the 18 points were numbers 15 and 18. The former point identified “modern dogmatism” as “the main opportunist danger” within the party-building movement in the present period. The latter point identified U.S. imperialism as “the main enemy of the world's people”. Groups around the country which identified with this perspective became known as “the Trend.”

In February 1978, a conference of the Committee and other Trend groups formalized the creation of the Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center (OCIC) and adopted the 18 Points of Unity as amended in August. The OCIC’s aim was to lay the basis for building a new Communist Party.

PWOC and its leader, Clay Newlin, played a leading role in the OCIC. However, the pressures of trying to run a local M-L organization and a national party-building process took its toll on PWOC. In 1979 a bitter struggle broke out in PWOC over charges of racism against various members and leaders. The resulting campaign against white-chauvinism decimated the organization and had the same devastating impact when it was subsequently carried over into the OCIC. By 1982, PWOC ceased to exist.

Primary Documents

The San Francisco-based Red Guard Party was founded in February 1969 and disbanded in July 1971. Influenced by the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the example of the Black Panther Party, the Red Guard Party espoused Mao Zedong thought, advocated armed struggle and viewed itself primarily as a military rather than a political organization. By 1971, this focus on military rather than political organizing and other contradictions led to the Party’s break-up, but a group of former militants went on to join I Wor Kuen.

Primary Documents

Resistencia Puertorriqueña began as a small group of radical Puerto Ricans in New York city who started publishing a small mimeographed newsletter, RESISTENCIA on July 25, 1970. Written exclusively in Spanish, it bore the inscription “In exile”, indicting that Puerto Ricans in the U.S. were part of the Puerto Rican nation, and as such were living “in exile”.

In July 1971, RESISTENCIA became bilingual publication and the group began to involve itself in the party building efforts of the New Communist Movement, participating in the Communist League’s National Continuations Committee. Breaking with the CL, Resistencia then gravitated toward the Revolutionary Wing of PRRWO-RWL, but soon broke with them as well. In August 1976, it renamed itself the League for Proletarian Revolution (M-L)(LPR) and began to expand its work, creating a mass organization called the National Liberation Struggles Support Committee.

In 1978 LPR drew close to another group, the Colorado Organization of Revolutionary Struggle (COReS). In 1980 the two groups merged to form the Marxist-Leninist League.

The Revolutionary Workers League (RWL) was formed in January 1974 from Marxist-Leninist elements active in the Youth Organization for Black Unity a nationwide student/youth organization, the Malcolm X Liberation University in Durham, North Carolina, Abdul Alkalimat’s People’s College, and the African Liberation Support Committee. At its birth, it was the largest black Marxist organization in the New Communist Movement.

While continuing to organize around support for African liberation movements and struggles in Black communities, in the period 1975-6, the RWL went through a series of internal struggles over its relationship to other new communist movement groups. Some leaders wanted the RWL to orient toward the October League and its party building process. Others favored collaboration with the Revolutionary Union as it moved toward the formation of the Revolutionary Communist Party. But the line that ultimately won out oriented the RWL toward the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO), the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO) and the August 29th Movement, who were loosely grouped together as the Revolutionary Wing. However, sharp differences developed within the Wing itself [for more on this see here] and ultimately, while some cadre left the RWL to join WVO, in 1977, the RWL consolidated organizationally with PRRWO to create the U.S. Leninist Core.

Periodical

The San Diego Organizing Committee (Marxist-Leninist) was a small Marxist-Leninist group formed in the summer of 1975. In late 1977 it dissolved with its members joining the Workers Congress (Marxist-Leninist).

The San Diego Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Collective was a small group which began life as the Ocean Beach Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Collective. Its members, who came out out the struggles against the Vietnam War, later became involved in community organizing in the Ocean Beach neighborhood of San Diego. The group was heavily influenced by the Praire Fire Organizing Committee.

Primary Documents

The Seattle Workers Movement was a small group under the leadership of the Seattle Branch of the Central Organization of U.S. Marxist-Leninists. It published the Seattle Worker. Also under its leadership was the Afro-Asian Latin American Solidarity Forum (Seattle) which issued a newsletter called The Patriot.

The Socialist Organizing Committee was formed in 1975 in Orange County, California out of a variety of groups and individuals who came out of the white new left. These included independent Marxist-Leninists, members of a Left History study group, students and teaching assistants from the University of California-Irvine, petty bourgeois intellectuals off campus, county workers, and workers in factories and the skilled building trades.

Later that year, SOC joined the New America Movement (NAM), where it struggled to promote a Marxist-Leninist line. A year later, SOC left NAM and became an independent Marxist-Leninist collective.

Venceremos began as a Chicano political organization in Redwood City, California in early 1969. In 1971, a split developed in the Revolutionary Union [documented in Red Papers 4]. As a result of the split, over half of the Bay Area Revolutionary Union, led by H. Bruce Franklin, one of the RU’s founders and including all the collectives from South San Francisco through Sunnyvale and some in San Jose, merged into Venceremos. The expanded organization was active in youth organizing, factory organizing and anti-imperialist struggles on Bay Area campuses.

Venceremos advocated armed self-defense, community control of the police, and reform of the prison system. To these ends, the group’s members engaged in a variety of activities, including working in prison education programs and running candidates for the Palo Alto City Council.

Venceremos broke up in 1972. Some of its former members went on to found the San Francisco Marxist-Leninist Organization in 1973, which the following year merged with the San Francisco-based League for Proletarian Revolution.

Wei Min She was a Marxist-Leninist Organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. It had it origins in the Asian Community Center (ACC), which had been created by the Berkeley Asian American Political Alliance in March 1970. In 1972, the ACC decided to become an explicitly revolutionary, anti-imperialist organization and renamed itself Wei Min She (Organization of the People).

Initially primarily a community-focused group, active in labor and neighborhood struggles in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Wei Min She gradually developed into a Marxist-Leninist cadre organization.

In 1973-74, Wei Min She had sharp differences with I Wor Kuen, the other Marxist-Leninist group active in San Francisco’s Chinatown. In this same period it drew close to the Revolutionary Union, ultimately merging with it when the RU became the Revolutionary Communist Party in 1975.

The Witchita Communist Cell (WCC) was a small Marxist-Leninist group which developed in Witchita, Kansas out of the mass anti-war and anti-imperialist movements of the 60’s and 70’s. Beginning with a series of M-L study circles, it was formally established in the Fall of 1976.

In 1977, the WCC rejected the “theory of three worlds” and accepted the Party of Labor of Albania as the leading center in the international communist movement. The following year, working with two other Kansas M-L groups – the Kansas City Revolutionary Workers Collective and the Kansas Collective for Proletarian Revolution – the WCC attempted to unite various other pro-Albania groups in party building. In particular, in early 1979, the WCC issued a call for a multilateral conference on party building. It seems that this effort was unsuccessful and the conference does not appear to have been held.

In 1980 the Witchita Communist Cell changed its name to the Kansas City Marxist-Leninist Cell. The following year, in August, it merged with the Kansas City Revolutionary Workers Collective to form the Organization for a Marxist-Leninist Workers’ Party U.S.A.

Primary Documents

The Worker Unity Organization was a small collective in St. Louis, Missouri. In the mid-1970s it was briefly a part of the Sojouner Truth Organization’s Federation of Marxist-Leninist Organizations. After leaving the Federation it oriented itself to the Organizing Committee for an Ideological Center.

The Asian Study Group (ASG) was formed in the early 1970s by Jerry Tung, who had formerly been a member of the Progressive Labor Party. Initially, ASG consisted primarily of Asian-Americans in New York's Chinatown. In 1976, the group changed its name to the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO) when it merged with a group in Philadelphia called Yellow Seeds. WVO launched Asian-Americans for Equal Employment and actively competed with other Chinese Marxist-Leninist groups in the community.

Through its participation in national party building activities including, for a brief time, the “Revolutionary Wing”, WVO was able to attract members from other groups, including some active former members of the Revolutionary Workers League.

In October 1979, with several hundred members, WVO would change its name to the Communist Workers Party.